U.S. May Have Played Role In Jamaica‘s 2010 Massacre

U.S. May Have Played Role In Jamaica‘s 2010
Massacre

To what extent, if any, did the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security(DHS) participate in the
slaughter of scores of Kingston, Jamaica’s, Tivoli Gardens
residents on May 24th, 2010?

The community was run by drug
lord Christopher (Dudus) Coke, a self-proclaimed
“president” wanted in the U.S. for drug and firearms
trafficking.

When he would not surrender to authorities,
the Army’s Jamaican Defense Force(J.D.F) and the Jamaican
Constabulary Force(J.C.F.) breached the barricades Coke’s
men had erected and gunfire erupted. Resistance was light
and the defenders melted away. Unarmed residents who had not
taken the opportunity to leave Tivoli by bus prior to the
gunplay were not so lucky.

“No fewer than (73 civilians)
were killed (as well as one soldier)” in the operation to
get Coke, and three other community residents are missing,
writes Mattathias Schwartz in last December 12th’s “The
New Yorker.” .

Although Jamaican authorities say many of
those slain were armed gunmen allied with Coke, they
recovered just six guns during the assault and to this day
“the Jamaican government has refused to make public what
it knows about how the men and (three) women of Tivoli
Gardens died,” Schwartz writes.

So has the U.S.
government, even though a Lockheed P-3 Orion surveillance
plane with an identifying DHS seal on its tail was flying
above Kingston relaying live video of Tivoli to Jamaican
forces on the ground, Schwartz notes. “The video could
corroborate, or refute, allegations that members of the
Jamaican security forces massacred dozens of innocents, and
could help identify the alleged killers,” “The New
Yorker” article suggests.

Investigators dispatched by
Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding were told by Tivoli
women “of police shooting unarmed young men inside their
homes, or dragging them out into the street and killing
them,” Schwartz writes.

A DHS official confirmed to
reporter Schwartz his agency had aircraft flying above
Kingston and that “all scenes were continuously
reported” and information turned over to Jamaican
authorities. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration(DEA)
spokesperson said, “We were absolutely not involved on the
ground in any of the operations.” A statement given to
Schwartz by the U.S. State Department and DEA stressed U.S.
law-enforcement officers at the American Embassy had not
made “operational decisions” during the incursion.

But
Schwartz writes, “The U.S. knew there was a risk of
violence against civilians during the operation” as
human-rights activists have long been collecting stories of
J.C.F. excesses, “including officers indiscriminately
firing on teen-age girls or crowded buses.”

In 2010,
Jamaican police killed 320 civilians apart from those slain
in the Tivoli attack, a figure 40 times as great as the New
York P.D. which covers a population three times as large,
and a UN report has noted “the propensity for
extrajudicial killings by the J.C.F.”

Once the police
gained control of Tivoli, “unarmed men of fighting age
were interrogated on the spot, and more than a thousand were
sent to detention centers, from which they were released a
few days later,” Schwartz wrote, but “dozens allegedly
(were) shot to death in custody.” Others, whose
protestations of innocence were not believed, were shot to
death on the spot in Tivoli by the police.

Meanwhile, Coke
was nowhere to be found. Nearly a month after what Schwartz
called “A Massacre in Jamaica,” Coke was caught by
police at a roadblock and has been held since at the
Metropolitan Correction Center in Lower Manhattan. He has
pleaded guilty to racketeering and faces up to 23 years in
prison, Schwartz writes.

But several scores of civilians
are buried in Jamaica’s May Pen Cemetery in consequence of
a deadly attack by Jamaican forces in which, for all its
denials, the U.S. played a significant role and was perhaps
more closely involved than it has let on.
#

*************

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who
formerly worked for major dailies and wire services. Reach
him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com).

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